Title

Authors

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

This article explores the representation of social enterprises—i.e., nonprofit and for-profit organizations whose managersstrategically and purposefully work to create social, environmental, and economic value or achieve a social good through the use of business techniques—in the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Representation of social enterprises helps create a dynamic curriculum through which law students learn to merge corporate legal theory with transactional law practice. Through service to social enterprises, law students (i) learn about corporate governance and corporate legal theory as well as business models and mechanisms that support social and environmental value creation at a time when the corporate sector is increasingly concerned about sustainability challenges; and (ii) engage in solving novel and unstructured problems, advocacy work, knowledge creation, and information facilitation to assist the developing social enterprise sector. Legal issues unique to social enterprises compel students to learn corporate governance and corporate practice methods in a manner not typically present in the non-experiential classroom.